"The Trouble with Wilderness; or, Getting Back to the Wrong Nature"

 

    In William Cronon's "The Trouble with Wilderness; or, Getting Back to the Wrong Nature", he talks about how over time our definition of wilderness has completely changed. I his essay, he mentions how going back about 250 years in European history that the wilderness used to have a very bad connotation to it. Back then it wasn't seen as a beauty a it is today. It was seen more as a place to avoid. Often called a wasteland, Wilderness became an area that was seen as ugly and worthless. In his essay Cronon states, "Its connotations were anything but positive, and the emotion one was most likely to feel in its presence was “bewilderment” or terror. (2)". Cronon explains in his article that our society has the wrong perception of wilderness by reminding us of how historically this wasn't the case. To my understanding of the reading, Cronon believes that there is nothing natural abut how we perceive wilderness because we have seen it as a waste and then now we see it as a place of sanctuary yet Wilderness itself hasn't changed. In a quote from the text, He talks about the only way to preserve nature. 

"The tautology gives us no way out: if wild nature is the only thing worth saving, and if our mere presence destroys it, then the sole solution to our own unnaturalness, the only way to protect sacred wilderness from profane humanity, would seem to be suicide. It is not a proposition that seems likely to produce very positive or practical results."

When reading this, I thought that it was very much on the extreme end. However, to raise an objection to this, it may seem like the only way to 100% restore wilderness and the natural world. It may seem like the only way to accomplish this. Cronon continues by saying that the Deep ecologists say that the whole demise of nature started with the agricultural revolution where humans fist began to cultivate and domesticate wilderness. On the objection side, I would agree with this because once we started to figure out that we could exploit nature, we did and at an execrated rate.  I think that Cronon would respond to this saying how absurd this proposition is. He stated, "The absurdity of this proposition flows from the underlying dualism it expresses. Not only does it ascribe greater power to humanity that we in fact possess—physical and biological nature will surely survive in some form or another long after we ourselves have gone the way of all flesh—but in the end it offers us little more than a self-defeating counsel of despair.".